Item #1:  Nuclear Power.  Without looking, guess what Doc Hastings says is “always predictable“.  Hint:  He represents the district that holds Hanford.

“This is always predictable, especially from the environmental left, when something like this happens. The first reaction is to close everything down,” Mr. Hastings, Washington Republican, said during an interview with The Washington Times-affiliated *“America’s Morning News” radio program.

“It’s predictable, but I don’t think it’s good policy,” he said. “That simply ignores what humanity is all about. … There are risks involved, and we ought to learn from those risks and proceed forward,” Mr. Hastings said.

It is that even-handed approach which, tends to lose the “proceed with caution” of any type hand in a jiffy.

I like the line about that it “ignores what humanity is all about“.  That’s the first interesting sentence (of any type of interest) I have heard from this man.  Anyway:

“Keep in mind, this was a 9.0 earthquake 75 miles away from these reactors, and the reactors were not harmed by the earthquake. It was not the earthquake that caused the problem in Japan, it was the tsunami. I think that’s very significant.

Phew.  That is a relief.  We should proceed with all haste and Build up Nuclear Reactors on all the faultlines, then.  And I don’t want to hear any “NIMBY”ers on this point.

See too NIMBY:

Some lawmakers accuse the president of acting outside the law and have vowed to continue funding, and fighting for, the Yucca Mountain project.

“What he has done is unilaterally said ‘We’re not going to do that,’ ” said Rep. Richard “Doc” Hastings, R-Wash, a nuclear power supporte whose state was an alternative to Yucca Mountain. It “was designated as a national repository by law, and no president can undo a law he doesn’t like.”

Actually, this is kind of interesting.  A subtle difference:

WASHINGTON — Republican Rep. Doc Hastings says any criticism of his environmental record is off-base for one reason: He’s spent his entire career in Congress trying to clean up a massive nuclear mess in his Central Washington district.

WASHINGTON – Republican Rep. Doc Hastings says any criticism of his environmental record is off base for one reason: He’s spent his entire career in Congress trying to clean up a massive nuclear dump in his central Washington state district.

But what I want to know is… will Hastings laud Obama for his courageous pro-nuclear stance, or is it not quite pro-nuclear enough — in a world where nationally famous Conservative pundits enter the debate swinging about the benefits of Radiation?

Item #2:  Doc Hastings on Daniel Webster.

…………………….
“It would be in our best interest to heed Daniel Webster’s words that are prominently inscribed on the walls of the House Chamber, ‘Let us develop the resources of our land … and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.’”

The problem is that Hastings deprived Secretary Webster of his First Amendment Rights, because the full quote is:

“Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.”
…………………………..

Those ellipses always get you, I guess.  But “build up its institutions, promote all its great interests” is always a struggle in terms of interpretation — when you can find a way to narrow what is an interest that is “great”.

Item #3:  It’s always pretty easy to put the tail of high gas prices on the Incumbent, I guess.

We’re through this ring over and over again.  We’ll go through it again when prices hit $5.

Item #4:  “The notion that the ethics committee, which is supposed to be the one committee that is nonpartisan, would allow one of its employees to split his time with another partisan committee? I’m stunned,” said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center.

No you’re not. 

It’s interesting to look up the latest on what this member of congress is up to and seeing something other than a mass of stories about wanting to kill off a population of wild animals, but it’s what I expected in the wake of a Nuclear Melt-down.

*Disclosure: the Washington Times is owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — apparently still.  It’s not that this bears all that much on this blog post’s excerpts, but you just can’t toss out any reference the Washington Times without pointing that out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 19th, 2011 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Doc Hastings and the 4th Congressional District of Wash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.